Interesting. The start of the (BBC) piece:

“Sir Keir Starmer has appointed former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a special envoy on global finance, [J4MB: Rachel from Accounts presumably still hasn’t read her copy of The Idiot’s Guide to Global Finance] as he attempts to shore up his position after his party suffered heavy election losses.

Downing Street said the prime minister had also hired former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman as an adviser on tackling violence against women and girls.”

From a related piece in The Times (£):

“Robert Jenrick, Reform’s Treasury spokesperson, said: ‘Genius. Bring back the guy who gave away our gold reserves. What could possibly go wrong?’

Under Brown, the Treasury sold more than half of the UK’s gold reserves between 1999 and 2002, at the bottom of the market. The sale generated about $3.5 billion.”

Gordon Brown was never elected a PM and lost the only general election in which he led the Labour party (2010). The price of gold averaged under £200/oz over 1999 – 2002. The current price is about £3,470/oz, some 17.3 times higher. The value of the gold sold by Brown would have risen in value from £3.5 billion in 1999 – 2002 to over £65 billion today.

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